Greetings all!
This post concerns an issue which affects me
personally, and which I likely will become even more invested in during the
coming months. This issue is that of the costs surrounding the pursuit of a
higher education in the United States of America. We know they are
significantly high; what matters is why, and what we can do to change that.
This week’s quote comes from Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from
Vermont who has described himself as a democratic socialist, the only one in
over six decades. I typically find more ground with him than most politicians
in America these days.
The cost of an undergraduate education has been rising for
decades, and has only been rising more sharply in the past few years. We can
already see that the average cost of education at a public university is over
13,000 dollars each year, while the cost of attending a private college is more
than double that price at over 32,000 dollars each year. This does not even
factor in costs beyond tuition, room and board. Students often purchase fairly
expensive meal plans at college, and must put in large sums of cash to get
textbooks each semester. There are bountiful ways for a college or university
to charge more money for a student to attend, and these costs will only be
compounded further as time passes if we do nothing.
If certain conditions were met, these rising costs
would not matter. If average GDP per capita and household wealth had been
rising alongside average American salaries, these numbers would not matter
nearly as much. If the ratio between financial aid and loans for education had
not been increasing so rapidly or had been decreasing to a more stable level,
these rising costs would mean even less. If these conditions were met, every
average American family could afford to send their children to most every
school without having to suffer enormous financial hardship, or put that
hardship on the shoulders of their kids. However, none of these conditions have
been met in recent years.
Unfortunately, the average American GDP per capita
(PPP) is about 49,000
dollars, and this number swings on a pendulum quite immediately in differing
regions. The median household income is about 50,000 dollars, an 8
percent drop since 2007. The American per capita personal income is about 40,000 dollars. This too
varies by state, with Mississippi having the lowest median personal income of
about 31,000 dollars. The average cost of living in the United States has only
been rising in the past years, to about 27,000
dollars each year, and that cost cuts out the possible costs of
marriage/divorce, college/student loans, credit debt, and retirement all
together. If all the possible yearly costs are averaged properly and added
together, the total comes to about 40,000 dollars. That’s quite a bit of cash
for a man or woman who doesn’t own their home permanently, has never married or
divorced and is not raising a family of any kind. This is especially
frightening, to know that the cost of living and median personal income are at
about the exact same cost. That means a person making 40,000 dollars a year
cannot spend anything on luxuries if they fulfill the average costs of necessities.
This situation is especially scary for those people making the minimum wage,
set at 7 dollars and 25 cents per hour. At an average of 2080 hours of work for
any American per year, these people make about 15,000 dollars each year. This
is far less than the average cost of living, even when many of the pieces of
that cost are cut away. These people will have to skimp on many essentials,
like food, just to survive in America today, let alone afford college for
themselves or their children. The worst thing among them all is the amount of
financial aid being given to students on average: just 12,000 dollars.
Not particularly frightening for public university students until you realize
the majority of that is made up in the form of student or parent loans, whose
costs will rise and compound exponentially each year. Just imagine how much
worse that is for private university students and parents.
By now, I’ve established that the costs of college
versus how much Americans can afford are far too high. In fact, it’s plain
absurd how bad it can get; some university tuition costs alone are more than
entire household incomes each year. How are students expected to be able to pay
these amounts without wallowing in unmanageable debt? The answer, in many
cases, is that they are not. The goal of most private universities is to pull a
profit, so if a student can’t pay their debt for a long time the college will
continually collect more and more money from them through interest, fees, and
penalties. Meanwhile, fresh-out-of-college employment rates and average
salaries are even lower than the national total averages, and this has
persisted for years. All of this equates to students and parents suffering for
years on end just to achieve an education through undergraduate school. This
can become doubly worse for those pursuing graduate school, as the extra years
pile on the costs even further.
Let me establish why this is wrong in the first
place. It’s easy to suggest that colleges should feel free to charge however
much money they want for students in order to turn a profit; this is the
free-market, so they should be able to function the same way as a business,
right? Nope, not even close. You see, this would only be true if education were
a privilege and not a right, and if less-costly yet equally as academically
honorable institutions existed across the nation. None of these cases are true.
To address the latter, we all know the big name schools across the country:
Rice, Caltech, Berkeley, New York, Boston, Chapel Hill, Chicago, the Ivy
League, etc. Not only are all of these schools highly expensive for most
students and significantly difficult to get into, but many are concentrated on
the eastern or western portions of the United States. Meanwhile, there are a
good lot of students in the Midwestern states that would have to travel halfway
across the country to attend a highly competitive school, let alone afford the
costs associated with such travel. Therefore no, there are not enough
competitive and affordable universities across the nation for colleges to
charge these enormous sums.
The former point, that education is a right, is one
I must elaborate more uniquely on. Education is clearly not a privilege; if it
was, elementary, middle, and high schools would all charge tuition. But they
don’t; all primary education is publicly funded by taxpayer dollars. True,
private options exist, though comparatively few students attend these schools
for results that are not always better than the public option. However, it
seems our country values education as a right only up until the age of
majority, because at that point a good portion of education is cut off from
public funding. Even public universities still charge fairly ludicrous sums for
students’ tuition, room and board. This is, frankly, both obscene and absurd.
Why should education not be a right? If education is a privilege, only those
with money and connections can afford higher education. This forces the poor
and middle class to either abandon hope of ever getting an education and a good
job, or forces them into the army so they can hope to afford college at a later
date. Either way, we end up with an inevitable plutocracy in which the rich
completely control the nation’s wealth, politics, and educational institutions,
a wildly unstable situation that hurts the majority.
Education is a right, up to and through tertiary
education; why should people be forcibly restricted from pursuing their dreams
by wealth? If education is a right, then it should therefore be publicly funded
in absolutely all cases; this means that even private universities should be
willing to give in to public funding, and public funding needs to be increased
significantly. Let’s take a look at nations in the European Union, which value
education as a right in full. Most students in these nations either pay tuition
close to just 1,000 dollars,
or none at all in several cases. Imagine that, paying nothing for college and
still getting a fairly competitive academic value out of it. Students are
paying whopping loads less for their education in Europe, and they still pump
out a large deal of Nobel Prize winners. The E.U. is still holding onto a very
high standard of living and median wages, and has a very highly educated
population in most every member state. I’m sure you can see the disparity, and
the comparatively easy solution to the crisis. Simply make college a public
institution, charge more on taxes, and make the costs of higher education much
lower much quicker for students from all economic groups. It pays off in the
long run to not have our incoming work-seekers laden with debt immediately.
That concludes my piece this week, and I hope I’ve
provided all the information necessary to bolster my argument. I am always open
for response here in the comments section, or on my email at zerospintop@live.com. As always, I can
be contacted through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Steam, and DeviantArt. I have
also recently opened myself a Tumblr account by the name of KnoFear through
which I can be contacted; I will likely be posting links to my work there as
well. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off.
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